Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot

by Jodi Compton

  I didn’t know how Jack Foreman would respond to hearing my voice, that of a hotly pursued murder suspect, on the phone. Most journalists supported law and order, but at the same time they rejected a role as unofficial agents of the police. Some went to jail rather than turn over their informants, notes, or film to the cops. Jack Foreman, cynical and hardworking, struck me as likely to be in that camp. I didn’t believe he’d automatically call the police after getting off the phone with me. If he believed I’d really committed the crimes, sure. But he’d known me. I had to believe that the idea of me as a double murderer wouldn’t add up for him.

  A year ago I’d had his home phone number committed to memory, but now I couldn’t remember it. A quick call to directory assistance told me that there was no John or Jack Foreman in the published records. So I requested the number for the Associated Press in San Francisco.

  I fed more coins into the slot—a long-distance phone card was clearly going to be in order—and dialed the number. After two rings a woman’s voice answered: “Associated Press.”

  “I’m trying to reach Jack Foreman,” I said. “Is he in?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s not,” the woman said. “Jack’s on sabbatical.”

  “Sabbatical?” I repeated. “Do you know when he’s coming back?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t,” she said. “He’s in Kiev, teaching investigative journalism at the university level. I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with him. Could another reporter help you?”

  “No,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

  I hung up, thinking that it was good that Jack was branching out and taking a break from the grind of being a newsman, but wishing that he’d timed it a little better. He’d been my only potential source of information and help in San Francisco.

  Then I half turned, almost jumped in my tracks, and whipped my head around to face the phone again. Behind me, only six feet away, were a pair of uniformed police officers.

  “—didn’t mean it like that. Of course it’s a tragedy, with a wife and kid, too,” one of them was saying. “But how often do you get to be part of a huge investigation like that? It’s something that really makes a department pull together.”

  “I’d rather not pull together, if that’s the price of it, two lives.”

  Were they talking about San Francisco? Even as I tried to overhear them, I looked for something to do to justify my continued presence at the pay phone. I pulled the phone book off its metal shelf and opened it, as if searching for a listing.

  The first cop was speaking again. “I’ll tell you one thing, she’s lucky she pulled that shit up in SF. I know some guys on the job down south. LAPD would eat her a-freaking-live.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” The second guy sounded older, and he spoke more slowly. “She killed a cop. Wherever she gets caught, I think she’s gonna come to Jesus pretty quick.”

  I heard their movements as they passed behind me. Looking to the right without turning my head, I could just see a squad car parked nearby, clearly their destination. I began to slide the phone book back onto its shelf.

  At that moment the cable that attached it to the phone snapped free. The book tipped in my hands, and I couldn’t catch it in time. It fell to the pavement with a loud smack.

  Quickly I sat on my heels to retrieve it, as the two cops stopped and turned around.

  “You okay there?” the younger one said.

  “Yeah. Fine.” I didn’t make eye contact.

  His partner drew closer. “Hey.”

  I looked up. There was nothing else to do. Anything else would have been suspicious behavior.

  The younger one was blond and blue-eyed, with a face that was hard-boned but innocent-looking, the kind of face that lost its freckles only a few years ago. His partner was more solidly built, with short-cropped light brown hair and a full mustache. His name tag identified him as Pratt.

  “What happened here?” He lifted a finger to his own cheekbone, mirroring the bruise on mine.

  “Oh, nothing. I was sparring at the gym.” I shoved the phone book back into place and stood up.

  “Really?” the younger guy said. “In town? Do you work out at—”

  “No, I don’t live around here. And I should get going. Be safe, now.”

  I turned and stepped off the curb, trying not to project haste. It was unwise to cut off a conversation with cops before they considered it finished. But neither was it smart to give them time to study my face at length.

  “Miss! Wait.” It was the voice of the older one, Pratt.

  So sorry, didn’t hear you. I kept going.

  “Hey, wait.”

  He wasn’t going to let it go. Reluctantly I stopped and turned to face him.

  He caught up to me at an awkward half jog. He said, “Listen, maybe I’m off the mark here, but if someone’s hitting you, there are resources.”

  He reached into his pocket, drew out a billfold, and produced a card. “The top two numbers are local, but the bottom two are nationwide, since you say you don’t live around here.” He extended it.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking it from him. “Nobody’s hitting me. But I’ll keep it, just in case.”

  “Good.” He regarded me uncertainly. “You know, you do look familiar.”

  “Really? But I’m from south of here. Outside of Lompoc.”

  “Oh, yeah? I know Lompoc. That’s Air Force country.”

  “Right. I was just a townie, though. I didn’t mix much with the military people.” I fingered the card as if hesitant. “Can I go?”

  “Yeah, you can go. Use that card if you need it.”

  Walking away, I decided not to go straight to the car. Should he look back, I didn’t want him to see the vehicle I was traveling in, nor Serena when she approached. If the puzzle pieces fell into place for him, sometime later, I didn’t want him to have any new information to pass along about Hailey Cain, other than about my new brown hair and fake bruise, which couldn’t be helped.

  I angled across the lot, heading for the delicatessen where Serena had gone, disciplining myself not to look back in the direction of Pratt and his partner. When I pushed my way through the door, Serena was at a self-serve condiment stand, getting napkins and straws. There were two white bags on the counter in front of her.

  “Hey, I was just coming,” she said.

  “There’s cops out there.”

  Her gaze shifted to the windows. “Where?”

  “Up near the store. They saw me but didn’t recognize me.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “You get the car and come around. The less they see of me again, or us together, the better.”

  She nodded, put the napkins and straws into the bag, and left.

  I stood inside the door, not too close, watching her retreating form. I couldn’t see Pratt and the other guy, but their car was still visible. A group of high-school-age kids came in, laughing together and briefly blocking my view. Then, when they were past, I saw a second police car crawling slowly up the far aisle of the parking lot, in the direction of the first.

  This was probably a popular shopping center for coffee and lunch breaks. That was probably all there was to it.

  Or Pratt could have called them.

  Had he recognized me and just been playing me with the wallet card of abuse hotlines? Was he engaging me in conversation to get a further look at my face? It didn’t make sense, unless he was a careful guy, too careful to confront a known cop killer in a public place, with an inexperienced young partner.

  But I’d been looking at his face the whole time he’d been seeing mine, since I dropped the phone book. I hadn’t seen anything change in his expression. Either he had the best poker face in the world or he’d been ignorant of who I was.

  The Caprice reached the curb outside the deli at about the same time that the second squad car pulled in next to the first. Lifting my chin, I pushed the door open and ambled quickly but casually to Serena’s car. Then I pulled the passeng
er-door handle, which snapped back against the door. It was locked.

  “Serena!” I bumped the glass hard with the side of my fist, then lowered my head against the edge of the roof, face tipped down, out of view. Serena reached over and opened the door, the latch clicking free as she did so. I slid hastily inside.

  “Sorry,” Serena said. “That other five-oh car distracted me.”

  I slid down, out of view again. “It might be nothing. Don’t panic.”

  It took a good fifteen minutes on the freeway before we were both satisfied it had been nothing. Serena had glided out into the center lane of 101 North and kept the speedometer needle at the posted sixty-five miles per hour, while I stayed in my uncomfortable position below the dashboard. Meanwhile she grilled me on my encounter with the police.

  “How close did they see you?”

  “Close. Like, normal range for conversation.”

  “You talked to them? Are you crazy?”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” I said, and explained about Pratt seeing my bruise and his suspicions of abuse.

  “Okay, so he didn’t suspect anything.”

  “Probably not.”

  I straightened up, then reached down between my feet, to where I’d left the deli bags on the floorboard. I got busy unwrapping sandwiches and handed Serena’s to her.

  “Listen,” I said, poking a straw through the lid of my Coke, “while we’re on the subject of the five-oh, there’s something I should tell you. I don’t want you to find out by accident and think I was hiding it from you.”

  “That sounds heavy,” she said. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been talking over the phone to a cop about the Eastman case, a cop that thinks I didn’t do the murders.” I sipped from my Coke. “It’s Magnus Ford.”

  Serena’s eyebrows jumped sharply, though she didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Ford, the freaking Shadow Man himself? You just called up and got through to him?” Then alarm broke through her surprise. “Hailey, you’re not gonna roll over on me, are you?”

  “Of course not, you goddamn know better,” I said.

  “I did, prima, but you’ve never been wanted for two murders before. You’ve got a lot to gain by trading.”

  “First, Ford doesn’t know I’m Insula,” I said, my tone matter-of-fact. “Second, even if he did, no one would go light on a cop killer just to get at a gangbanger, even a shot caller like you. Third, if I was going to cut a deal like that, I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you I’m talking to the guy. How smart would that be?”

  Serena nodded slowly. “I guess so,” she said. Then, curiously, “So what’s he like?”

  As if I’d met a celebrity. After a second the absurdity struck both of us, and we started laughing.

  12

  Four hours later I was lying on a hotel bed, about five floors above Powell Street. Serena had registered for us; I’d waited in the car for her to come back with the keys before we’d gone up in the elevator.

  She was in the bathroom now, and I was watching TV, though the Eastman case wasn’t dominating the news anymore; it was relegated to the crawl on CNN. Lack of new information, I supposed, and a lack of reporters to cover what there was.

  Until I’d met Jack Foreman, I hadn’t realized that newspapers and TV stations, like most businesses, were short-staffed on weekends. In theory, Jack had explained, everyone acknowledged that news didn’t differentiate between weekday and weekend. In practice, he’d said, any reporter with any amount of seniority had an “enterprise” piece in the can by Friday night and spent Saturday and Sunday at home with the kids.

  I’d been surprised, told him that I’d thought reporters lived to rush out the door at any hour in pursuit of a good story. Jack had shaken his head. “A rare few,” he’d said, “but you’d be surprised how many are willing to let a story jell for a day. That’s what my old editor in New Jersey used to call it. Or editors say, ‘We’ll run a follow tomorrow.’ ” He’d laughed at my look of disbelief.

  Tomorrow, Monday, the gears would begin to mesh in earnest. Whether that would be good for me or bad, I didn’t know. I had to believe that eventually, under enough scrutiny, this case would render up a detail that would tell investigators I hadn’t committed these crimes, despite the fingerprint on the casing, despite everything.

  If that didn’t happen, if things really went sour here, maybe I could join Jack Foreman in Kiev. Maybe he could use a bodyguard. Journalists got killed sometimes in the developing former-Soviet nations. Besides, we’d always gotten along fine together in bed.

  Restless, I flipped away from CNN, around the other cable news channels until I recognized the exterior of the Eastman home, no longer under police barricades and crime-scene tape, closed up and empty. I turned up the sound, but not fast enough to catch the thrust of that report before the story changed to international news.

  Serena came out of the bathroom, glanced at the TV and saw a commercial playing, and sat down on the corner of her bed. “Okay,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

  I rolled over to lie with my chin in my hand. “Can you make a run to a drugstore?” I asked.

  “What do you need?”

  “Safety pins, in a couple of different sizes, and a little screwdriver.”

  “Lock-picking stuff,” she said, understanding immediately. “You’re going to the dead woman’s house. Are you sure that’s safe?”

  “Reasonably,” I said. “It’s been two days. The technicians and detectives shouldn’t need a round-the-clock presence anymore. I’ll go late tonight and park a little ways off and walk to the house under cover of darkness. It’s about the quietest residential area in the whole city. The neighbors will be sleeping, and even the most ambitious detective isn’t going to be there after midnight.”

  “There are graveyard-shift cops,” Serena said.

  I shook my head. “Those are the kind of cops that mop up bar fights. Major-crimes detectives and forensics people might get called out to a fresh murder scene after midnight, but no one’s going to be doing routine follow-up work at that hour.”

  “Okay, but what are you looking for?”

  “Anything,” I said. “Anything that’ll tell me who this ‘Hailey’ chick was. If she left any clothes or shoes behind, I’ll know something about her height and build. If there’s red or pink swipes on the bedspread, I’ll know what color she paints her toenails.”

  “Then we can stake out shoe stores and look at women’s bare feet until we catch her.”

  “I’m just saying, she’s a woman, I’m a woman. You think most cops know how often you paint your toenails sitting on the bed, and how you accidentally smear a little on the spread because you’re moving around again before they’re dry?”

  She didn’t look convinced, but said, “Give me some money, then. For the drugstore.”

  13

  By twelve-thirty A.M. I was in the Caprice, driving the speed limit and obeying all traffic laws, heading south on surface roads toward the St. Francis Wood neighborhood.

  Serena wasn’t with me. It wasn’t at all like her to fall asleep before midnight, much less without the use of Ambien or marijuana, but tonight she’d done both, dropping off peacefully in front of the quietly murmuring TV set we were both watching. I’d wanted her as a lookout, but couldn’t bring myself to rob her of natural sleep. So I’d done a touch-up on my makeup bruise, gathered the tools I’d need and the car keys, and slipped out, leaving the TV on, lest the unexpected absence of its noise wake her.

  Now, driving alone and cautiously, I flicked the turn signal and exited off Route 1 toward Mount Davidson.

  Ask most people where the rich live in San Francisco and many of them will mention Pacific Heights or the Marina District. Outside the Bay Area, mention of St. Francis Wood gets you a lot of puzzled glances. It’s a secret garden, guarded at its foot by a graceful white fountain and from above by the stark white cross on Mount Davidson, hilly and hidden and very rich, but rarely ostentatious. It was my bad
luck—well, worse luck on top of bad—that the girl who chose to steal my face and name had ended up here, of all places in San Francisco. In a city that wedged even its millionaires in with a shoehorn, St. Francis Wood offered that rarest of luxuries—a little space and privacy. The other Hailey had never had to ride in an elevator with her neighbors. If she’d been careful to come and go from Eastman’s home in her car, mostly after dusk, she would never have to be up close with her neighbors at all.

  I didn’t have Eastman’s address, but the news reports had shown the house on camera, a narrow two-story of wood and brick, the wood painted a pale, creamy yellow and the brick aged and mottled with white, not the stark all-red kind of barracks and dormitories. English ivy climbed its edges, and April tulips bordered the slender strip of lawn.

  When I spotted it, there was no sign of an ongoing police presence. I eased past at about fifteen miles an hour, then doubled back to park far enough away that the car wouldn’t point to my location. Bad enough I had to park a car like Serena’s in this neighborhood at all. It was, in 911 lingo, a suspicious vehicle: a cheap sedan in a district of late-model imports and luxury SUVs. It stood out, but there was nothing I could do about that, except park it courteously flush with the curb and not leave it there any longer than I needed to.

  The nearly full moon illuminated my surroundings to an almost uncomfortable degree as I walked back toward the house. I stayed in shadows until I could cross Eastman’s dew-wet lawn, then unlatched a gate and went into the backyard. It was narrow, with several shade trees at the edges. Brambles that would produce blackberries in the summer overran the back fence, and the grass was native grass brought up by winter rains, not deliberate green turf. Protected from view by both the trees and the predawn dimness, I paused to consider my options. A pair of French doors opened onto a small porch, but of more interest to me were two steps that led up to a door on the east side of the house. The door and the way the roof angled downward there suggested to me a room with its own entry. Was this where she’d lived, the girl who’d posed as me?